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Defending the grand vision of the Human Brain Project

Criticism of the European Union's Human Brain Project misses the point of its unifying mission, says the project's co-executive director Richard Frackowiak

By Richard Frackowiak

(Image: Andrzej Krauze)

“A GRASS roots effort is under way to stop the project… ‘Mediocre science, terrible science policy,’ begins the spirited letter…”

The year was 1990 and the journal Science was reporting on what it called a “backlash” against the Human Genome Project.

Given the furore this past week you could be forgiven for thinking these words were written about another big science initiative&colon; the Human Brain Project (HBP).

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Less than a year into its planned 10-year lifetime, the project was publicly criticised in an open letter posted online on 7 July, signed by more than 150 scientists. At the time of writing a further 400 individuals have added their names.

The Human Genome Project weathered its criticisms and reached its goal in 2003, birthing the entire field of genomics and opening new medical, scientific and commercial avenues along the way. The Human Brain Project will similarly overcome its own teething troubles and catalyse a methodological paradigm shift towards unified brain research that weaves together neuroscience, computing and medicine.

The goal of the HBP is a comprehensive understanding of brain structure and function through the development and use of computing tools. This is popularly deemed a “simulation of the whole human brain” but we prefer the analogy “CERN for the brain” (after Europe’s premier particle physics lab)&colon; a large facility for diverse experiments and sharing of knowledge with a common goal of unlocking the most complex structure in the known universe.

We think of the project as a ‘CERN for the brain’&colon; a large facility for experiments and sharing knowledge

This brings me to two of the criticisms in the open letter&colon; the apparent lack of experimental neuroscience and data generation in the HBP, and the emphasis on information and communications technologies (ICT) in what is billed as a neuroscience project. I will address a third criticism regarding funding later on.

Regarding the first charge, experiments and data generation are not the primary goals of the HBP for a very good reason. Each year, neuroscientists already publish something on the order of 100,000 original research articles. Meanwhile, hospitals produce vast amounts of patient data about poorly understood conditions, from dementia to autism and schizophrenia. Data generation is not the problem. Making sense of it is. Until now, there has been no large-scale strategy or mechanism for sharing, organising, integrating, or analysing results produced by individual labs and from patient data, which remains inaccessible and fragmented.

That brings me to the second charge. To address this piecemeal progress, a federated approach is needed. This is what the HBP offers, and why it is (initially) heavy on the development of new technologies. Six ICT platforms will integrate knowledge from the scientific literature and hospitals, and will be available to the scientific community in 2016. This resource will let us “know what we don’t know”, allowing for targeted, rational experiments. We are also extremely keen for cognitive and behavioural neuroscientists to interact with and shape these platforms, as well as using them to test brain-inspired computing systems.

Far from being sidelined, neuroscience remains front and centre in the HBP. The ICT tools are meant as a scaffold; a bridge to support a convergence of fields that is already underway. Neuroscience and medicine can only benefit from emerging supercomputing technologies, and we see the HBP as the vehicle to achieve this for brain research. While fields like physics and astronomy have embraced computer simulation and other tools of the digital age, biology has long been reticent to move away from insular benchwork.

This is not to say it’s our way or the highway&colon; individual investigator-driven research will always have its place, both within and outside the HBP. Any related project, new or ongoing, can join the HBP as a Partnering Project. The technologies and resources created in the HBP will also be broadly available.

And so to the third criticism, regarding funding. The HBP’s roots are in neuroscience but it seeks to use the tools of medicine and computing as well as those of neuroscience to advance all three fields. That is why initial funding comes from the ICT arm of the European Commission, not the neuroscience arm.

The HBP is designed with big goals, and big outcomes, in mind. Until we organise existing neuroscience data we will be in no position to know whether the HBP’s goals are, as our critics have maintained, unfeasible. At €50 million per year, the HBP makes up only 5 per cent of the annual European neuroscience research budget, but it gives us a chance to truly “go big” and build on the results that are already being generated. The HBP will provide the crucial missing layer to help us make sense of our data and ensure that we are extracting all of its value.

We believe the productive way forward is to embrace the model of scientific sharing and openness that has been a great boon to so many other fields. Across the HBP’s 12 research areas, hundreds of scientists at 112 partner institutions in 24 countries are working collaboratively to build new tools that everyone, including the signatories of the open letter, will find useful.

The EU is now uniquely positioned with the technology, the know-how, and, crucially, the investment, to take the leaps and bounds that future medicine, future neuroscience, and future computing, not to mention future society, demand of us. We believe our critics share these goals, and we hope they will take this chance to learn more about the HBP’s diverse, multidisciplinary efforts and engage with us in productive scientific dialogue.